Architects and interior designers have long recognized the durability and beauty of finishing floors and walls of a building with stone tile. Stone tile finishes take on even greater beauty when arranged in mosaic form. To create the mosaic, many slabs of stone are cut into small pieces of tile. The tile pieces are typically randomly mixed together during the cutting process. The individual tiles are then shipped to a job site and secured to the walls or floors of a building. The mixed tile pieces create a handcrafted look by blending together the differently shaded tile pieces and the grain patterns of individual stone slabs.
One problem in creating tile mosaics is that during installation each tile must be secured to a wall or floor piece-by-piece. This process is time consuming and labor intensive. A worker can typically only install 2.5 square feet of mosaic tile per day. This creates tremendous logistic problems at the work site, especially when the tile mosaic is installed at or near a main entrance of the building.
To reduce job site logistics problems, the tile pieces can be secured to a backing sheet prior to shipment. The sheets of tile can then be secured to the floor or wall more quickly. Unfortunately, each tile piece must still be secured to the backing sheet piece-by-piece. The same labor intensive and time consuming process is still required.
An additional problem is that the stone tiles cannot be cut very small, especially when the aspect ratio of the tile is close to that of a cube. For example, marble is commonly available in 12.times.12.times.3/8 inch (30 cm.times.30 cm.times.1 cm) slabs. Yet, the only known commercially produced marble mosaic has tile pieces cut to about 19/32.times.19/32.times.3/8 inches.
The present invention is provided to solve these and other problems.